DirtyTrailShoes : Scott Noack's Running Blog: Race Report : Kaiser Permanente (KP) SF HM 02/01/2015 (3rd year running)

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Race Report : Kaiser Permanente (KP) SF HM 02/01/2015 (3rd year running)

This is the third year I've run the KP San Francisco Golden Gate Half Marathon and probably the most fun for three reasons:

The weather was stunning perfect
PR'ed by nearly six minutes over last year
Was able to encourage more fellow KP-IT employees to run this year

Last year (2014) was a HM PR for me but under challenging conditions. If you want to read about the storm conditions we ran in and my slip on a manhole cover read the gory details here.

Strava has a nice feature that once you name a run a 'route' then it will automatically compare them. Here Strava compares my last three races. You can clearly see a nice ~7 min improvement from 2013->2014, then a nice ~6 min improvement from 2014->2015. I'd sure like to think if I continued to train and improve that I could knock off another ~5 off for a 1:42 next year! Clearly not linear and it is going to be fun to see over time how fast I can become on the same course. If I had not been suffering from that dang cough that has been going around for the last four weeks I think I could have nailed my ~7:45min/mile average I was actually shooting for (not the 8:03 I measured with my Garmin 310xt). However, I'm not unhappy. In fact, I was downright giddy passing the finish with the clock showing a 1:47!

In case you were wondering. The top male finished the HM in 1:06:29 or roughly a 5:05 min/mile pace for 13.3 miles!

Some other changes over last year. This year I did not carry a water bottle and only carried one GU. I drank a bottle (~20 of Tailwind) 30 min before the race and hit the Aid Stations (AS) every 4 miles or so for a cup or to of water then had one GU at mile 7. That's it. As far as shoes I wore my trusty ~7 oz Skechers Go Run 2 (GR2)s which worked perfectly paired with Injinji Toe socks.

The weather this year was a balmy 55 degrees going out at 8AM and heated up to about 68 by 10AM. This is warm for San Francisco standards out in the "Avenues" but for a runner was pretty much perfect dressed in shorts with 3" seam and single technical 'T'. Doesn't get much simpler as a race goes.

This year we also had a record number of KP employess (2K), KPIT (520), six from our team and about 10 that I knew from work. Was a great turn out.